Helios 3D-360 Video

Now part of the unity VR Essentials, Helios is a 3D/360 video capture plugin for Unity that allows you to capture stunning recordings from the Unity editor in popular 3D formats such as Equirectangular and Stereographic projection. It will create videos you can directly up load to popular sites like YouTube and Facebook in native 360 format.

IF YOU NEED SUPPORT:
Please do not leave a message here on the Forum, as Unity does not notify me about them.
Instead, please join me on my Skype Support group, with over 70 Members, you will get direct realtime support there first: https://join.skype.com/dixRfDRa6MI7

Check out the website: www.helios3dvideo.com

Helios is available on the asset store here: LINK

Also, please take a look at Pegasus by Adam Goodrich.
Helios is a fantastic recording suite, but Pegasus is the counterpart for perfect camera movement.

Here are some preview movies:

Helios is packed full of amazing features that make it a very easy to use and highly productive tool.

Features:
-Capture video in 480, 720,1080, 4K and 8K cinematic aspect ratios
-Record at 9,15, 24, 25, 30 and 60 FPS
-Supports Stereoscopic 360
-Automatically encode MP4 video
-Automatically creates High Quality Animated GIFs
-Automatically adds 360 spatial metadata to videos
-Support realtime audio recordings
-Videos compatible with Oculus Headsets
-Videos compatible with Vive Headsets
-Videos compatible with Google Cardboard
-Videos compatible with Web Browser and Mobile phone 360 video players
-Traditional 2D camera rig included
-Support Equirectangular videos
-Support Stereographic (little planet) videos
-Record specified frames in a range
-Hotkey Recording
-Session recorder to record live player movement for later recording
-Built in antialiasing
-Custom super fast shaders
-JPEG and PNG image support
-2D and 3D demo scenes included
-Full source code included
-Multithreading
-Works in Deferred and Forward rendering
-Designed from the ground up to be compatible with Pegasus by Adam Goodrich

Though Helios is an Offline Rendering system which has a focus on High resolution and high frame rate, it does come with a session recording system that you can record camera movement data in normal speed which is played back at render time.

Unity 5.4 Beta Compatibility
Presently, Helios is compatible with the Unity 5.4 beta 21, but not with previous versions

 

Give us more info already!!! it's been an hour...
Can be promising depending on these info. Feed us or is it a guess game?
Render 360 images for VR, has some sort of a compiler to render to videos??? Would be awesome. Looking forward to knowing more about it.

 

Oh sorry, I was actually just making a forum post to link up in the asset help files.

Here is the TLDR:
Install Helios
Drop Helios Prefab in your scene
Use the Helios Macro recorder to record a camera/character movement track (Optional).
Run Helios and it will read your movement track and export a collection of equirectangular image files (full reversed cubemap sphere/3D/360. etc...)
Click the Make Video button and get a free MP4 file ( with YouTube/Facebook spatial metadata)
Upload your videos .

Make up to 4K 60FPS 3D video files.

Helios is an offline rendering engine with more attention focused on image quality and steady framerate.
This is why the macro recorder is nice because you can record at normal gameplay speed in the editor, and get the exact movement in the video.

Realtime audio is included.

I still have an open beta if you would like to play with it

 

I think, I'd rather let someone who has the time to play with it and gives good accurate feedback have that beta access. I'd rather pay for a nice finished product. I'm all over my Gear VR these days, really thinking about projects to do... here again don't have time... but I'm totally inspired when I see tools like these.
Keep it up. Definitely look promising. Thanks for giving more info.

 

Haha, yeah
I'm close to the initial release, but then again Im always close

 

Quick question, lets say i have a 3Rd person project, can I record the 360 video while playing at run time inside the editor?

 

Yup!
There are actually a few options here.
You can :
-attach the Helios rig to your character at an offset
-attach the Helios rig to an Orbit script that will follow your character
-use the built in Helios Controller and just manually follow your character around
-use the built in Helios Controller as well as the built in Session Recorder and record a movement track
- leave the Helios Rig stationary but in a place within the scene that has a full view of verything

 

Awesome. Thanks.

 

Or,
attach the rig to Curvy, Cinema Director, Simple Waypoint System, Or a forthcoming product from another asset developer which I promised I will not discuss

 

What kind of compression does happen when creating the Mpeg4 Video? Can you specify it? Will you support some external other codecs? ( dvx, avi, etc...)

 

Helios creates a stream of still images which are then sent to FFMPG.
Being that there are only a handful of venues which support 3D embedded video playback at the moment (YouTube, Facebook, GoProx website) I don't see much need(at the moment) for other codecs.

Specifically, I format the videos to standard 16:9 aspect ratios when I send them to FFMPEG.
The user is allowed to specify the Framerate, Scale, Clip Length, Audio Source

HOWEVER
If you dont want to use FFMPEG, you can just take the collection of stills and push them to whatever local video editing tool you have installed (Premier Pro, After Effects, etc...)
and export it however you like.

 

This is looking great. VR is the future, man. The combination of audio and video make this infinitely more usable than the other solutions I've tried.

 

I've been helping to test this with the plans of using it to help showcase some packs that I'm working on. I will hopefully have some videos to share here soon once I figure out what I'm doing. Getting close, but not close enough to avoid embarrassing myself publicly.

But so far, all of the problems I have had with testing have been things that I have done wrong and John quickly straightened me out. Oh, there were a couple of bugs we found and helped squash. But I'd say 90%+ of what was available when I started helping John test was already pretty solid.

Great job putting together another great asset, John!

 

Great work so far John, ツ

 

Very cool.

Does it allow:
1) 8 and 16k offline resolution render?
2) Adjustable jpeg / png quality settings? (Let's say we create a long 360 pan and want to not overfill harddrive - as 16k pan can be like 500mb bitmap / frame - we're hoping jpeg could be about 6-10mb / frame)
3) What settings do you recommend in ffmeg?

Thanks!

 

For right now, the max is 4K recording (which is offline as well).
I'm experimenting with some new shader ideas to get up to that resolution, but this version is 4K max.

The PNG and JPEG encoding is the default Unity settings, so PNG is Unity's default, JPEG allows you to specify quality.

As far as use of FFMPEG, thats a really broad question, can you narrow that down for me?

Thanks,

 

Yay!

 

congrats!

 

Nice work! I'm using the free CapturePanorama for the time being (as it does any resolution), but looking forward to updates from you

 

Version 1.0.1 is being submitted this weekend with the following changes:
1) Fixed an issue with paths and scene names with spaces in them
2) Added support for a new Remote Control recording system where other assets can tell Helios when to record
3) Added a new beta tool to let you record many different objects in the session recorder including animation state.
4) Misc bug fixes
5) Removed documentation from the package and linked to the website for the latest docs http://www.helios3dvideo.com

 

Well technically you can output at ANY resolution if I wanted to upsample, the trick and limitation is in Unity's ability to use cube maps as those are limited to 2048 which Helios will output into 4K with no upscaling.

 

Only a few more days to get Helios is the intro price of just $18.00
The beginning of July it goes up to $25.00

 

Aaaand it looks like Unity has already adjusted it, sorry folks.

 

YAY! I grabbed it JUST in time! lol Played around with budget last night and decided to go ahead and pick up since I knew I'd be using it a lot!

But regardless, $25 is still an awesome deal for what it does! If all goes well, I'll have some Helios-made videos on all of my stamps pack pages to showcase my stamps for Gaia by the end of next week!

Great work John!

 

You hit it in the nick of time.

 

Help...Not sure what Im doing wrong.. Added the helios 3d prefab to my unity project as a child to my 'character'. disabled the session recorder, controller and look script. Disabled the audio listener on my main camera as unity complained there were two.
Trying to set the working folder was failing with an error so just created a /HeliosTemp folder at the root of my drive.
Set my resolution, frame rate and encoding quality.
Played the scene.. The heliostemp folder starts filling with the png files... and they look good (although a bit washed out compared to the normal running screen).
Stop the play mode then click on the 'make video' button in helios
A text window (textedit) then opens full of garbage called Spacial Media Metadata injector. The make video button has now disappeared. It hasn't produced a video pre injection nor post injection. What's wrong and how can it be fixed.
Running unity 5.3.5f1 on OSX 10.11.5
Ive got the make video button back by restarting Unity but clicking it just reproduces the same symptoms

 

Hi there,
First of all, thanks for purchasing Helios!
I'm sorry that you are having some trouble getting your video to compile, let me ask a few questions:
1) Do you have the latest version of Helios (1.0.1), there were some issues in the initial release that caused problems with files and folders that had spaces.

2) Can you check the "Debug" option and click the Make Video button again, this will write out to the console the full command that Helios is attempting to run

3) If you would like to have realtime chat/support, you join my skype chat group at: https://join.skype.com/Cb69olXJbDTo

 

Hi John,
Checked out a few things, on my OSX machine, ffmpeg isn't flagged as an executable so that never runs, I presume its a similar thing with the injector but haven't checked that out.
I've been trying things out under windows and am having more success. Had a few issues where ffmpeg didn't seem to be run as the injector popped up pretty quickly. The output from the console had
-framerate 60 -i "D:\Downloads\videos\HeliosTemp\img%05d.png" -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vf scale=854:480 -preset ultrafast -t 30 "D:\Downloads\videos\HeliosTemp\DemoScene.mp4"
which looks ok. Running mmpeg manually with the settings copied from the console log created the video and the injector worked ok.
Weirdly depending on my settings it seems a little random. ffmpeg now seems to be running ok and creating the video on Windows, but have had a couple of instances where the injector doesn't seem to be injecting stuff as the video plays as a green screen in koto and youtube just shows a standard video of the 'whole' flatterned sphere. Just changing the quality and resolution settings seems to fix this.
Havent had time to try changing the file attributes on the mac so not sure if its just that affecting osx.
Thanks for the offer of a skype session. Hopefully I'm not far away from success (I have managed to get a video up on youtube from my windows machine)
Couple of questions though... If I want to put post processing effects on, the documentation says to add them before the helios script. I assume the effects go on the Helios3d object and not on the child stitcher object (they both have cameras)?
Also if we are scripting the movement and rotation of the main object and the helios rig is attached to that, is it ok to have it rotate or should be be forcing the rig to stay upright and also stop the rotation around the Y axis?
Lastly, in the earlier videos, the rig had 6 cameras and it showed a 'logo' that appeared in the output video by including the logo in one of the camera views. It looks like things have changed as all those cameras no longer seem to be there. Is there a way of including a logo with the new setup?
Another thing I have noticed at least on windows which might be what was causing the video not to be generated in Windows sometimes... If you include an audio file, it's path doesn't get quoted in the call to ffmpeg which causes ffmpeg to fail with a file not found error if the path has a space in it. You correctly quote the path to the images and video output but not the audio file path.
By the way, I know I'm having a few problems, but it when it works, it is brilliant. If my post has put you off, please don't let it. Buy the addon, it does work for the most part, just one or two things need work arounds until the next release and it's superb.

 

Just managed to get something uploaded to youtube. Getting a bit of flickering but pretty impressed once YouTube had finally processed the video (long after they said they had finished).

 

NICE!! Your terrain is beautiful!

Making the 3D videos takes a bit of getting used to but it is an awesome tool! And yeah, the whole slow YouTube got me too. Especially the slowly popping up of all the different resolutions and then the time to process to 3D.. I had thought I screwed something up when I saw first the missing view control to look around and then again when it was only a low resolution.. But then they all popped in

I don't have any production ready ones to share yet.. Still trying to work some issues out... (which may be user issues, right John? lol) But hope to have a bunch soon!

 

Heya, sorry I was out at a family gathering today and didn't have good internet to answer your questions.
First of all, I don't feel put off in the least. I am very happy to help in any way I can. 360 video is a new thing and we are all having to learn things outside our comfort zones.

OK, El Capitan...
I use Yosemite, so Apply may have changed the way the command line works and how terminal calls work.
I can look into this, but at the moment, Im not exactly sure what to do about it, if OSX is not seeing the files as executables, than thats a real problem.

I'm glad you got a workflow figured out on your Windows box, but it bothers me that you are not 100% on OSX.
I will be writing an update tomorrow for some other things, and maybe we can coordinate some testing on El Captain.

As for scripting movement, you can script transform movement all you want, however rotations will be ignored, as the cubemap renderings are always in world forward zero, which you honestly dont want to muck with anyway as you want to users to be able to choose what the look at.

It seems that you are reffering to a lot of things from the old PDF documentation from version 1.0, which was pulled from 1.0.1 and put online on my website at www.helios3dvideo.com . The documentation is much more current there, and I would look there instead.

Yes, there was an issue in version 1.0 with spaces in file names and paths, but was corrected in 1.0.1, so please make sure you have the current version.

 

Fantastic!
This looks Epic!
I love to see what users make with my stuff

The flickering you are seeing is caused by LOD switching, you may want to consider adjusting your LOD levels and refreshing them....oh and yeah, YouTube can take a LONG TIME unfortunately, especially on higher resolutions.

Would you mind that I link up your video on my User Videos section on the website?

Cheers!

 

Oh, and you asked about post processing.
You want to place those on the Stitcher GameObject, but above the stitcher script itself

 

Doh! Something else I was doing wrong!

 

Welcome back to the Forums!

 

Hey,
I have purchased your asset which is very great and useful. But I really need to know how I can
settling the encoder to increase the numbers of seconds. I couldn't find the render lenght... there is a clip lenght I have changed the setting up to 9000. And nothing happen.
Could you let me know how can increase the numbers of second for recording more than 1 min 15 sec.?

Thx

Pedro

 

Hi Pedro, thanks for your purchase!

Can you tell me which version you downloaded and installed?
The latest version will be 1.0.2

If you have not already looked, try taking a read over the documentation at http://www.helios3dvideo.com

There are a few things that can cause your video to stop recording after a short time.
1) running out of drive space
2) you have a session files saved in the sessions folder under the Assets/UtopiaWorx/Helios/Sessions
3) you set your record mode to only record a few seconds
4) something else, which we will need to diagnose

If you have not already joined, I have a live skype chat group at : https://join.skype.com/Cb69olXJbDTo
Im an in the USA, but often always online.

 

For those of you interested:
I am working on a new feature for Helios.
You will now be able to output your videos in High Quality Animated GIF Format!
May not be ideal for 360 videos, but for the 2D side of Helios it opens a LOT of doors for where you can post your content.

 

An oldie but a goodie:

 

I've just bought this, and at first glance it seems good. I'll admit I dived in and haven't read the docs in detail. I've not been able to get it to save to a fixed clip length, ie. start recording, record 2s, then stop; I have to manually stop it.

I do want to record pre-plotted camera moves - I assume that's possible. I know, know: RTFM. I am using CineMachine Base Rig and thinking how to record those moves using Helios.

On the formats and FPS settings. Your 1080P actually outputs to 2048 x 1024. 1080P is actually 1920 x 1080 (16:9) - a standard HD format, whereas your 2K format is not. Likewise for your 4K. For output to video, is there any possibility of having these real world settings included please? HD 1080P and UHD, which is 3840 x 2160. As it stands, It's best to output to your 4K, crop and size down to actual 1080P, and in my case retime from 24fps to 25fps. Not a massive deal, but it's a set of steps and quality hits that are hassle and unnecessary. If we could have 25fps as well as any other standard frame rates, that would be good.

Obviously my primary interest is in 2D output, though I also need the 3D VR output. Don't get me wrong, this is shaping into a solid asset. I spent almost twice this on URecord, which had it been developed fully and supported would have been perfect for 2D output; as it stands I'm feeling pretty ripped off after getting that. Maybe I do the guy a disservice, but he seems to have gone silent running since January. That aside, Helios is really looking top notch and I'm looking forward to further developments, but a tighter settings panel for formats and frame rates would be most appreciated by those folks bouncing between Unity and the video world.

Now I better go read that manual and see if I can get it to start and stop when I want

 

Heya JBT, thanks for the purchase, as a single indie developer, I really appreciate it.

Let me try to reply to your questions...

1) RTFM:
yeah, Helios has grown into an rather sophisticated piece of software
I keep the documentation up to date on my website at: http://www.helios3dvideo.com
That being said, most of it should be fairly intuitive and straight forward.

2) Pre plotted camera movement:
This is a long discussion, but the TLDR is that Helios ships with a functional movement recording system called the session recorder. If you look on the Helios prefabs, you will see that they have a component called Session Recorder as well as Helios Controller and Helios Look. This is a macro recording system which you can use before you start your rendering phase. Using this, you can record your scene as normal, and run/walk/jump around as a first person character would. While you are moving, Helios is recording all of your movement data (transform position, rotation, animation state), once you have finished recording you movement tracks, Helios will use that data on each subsequent playback. Granted, this may not be the ideal solution for cinematic style camera tracking. Should you want to use other camera movement systems like Pegasus, Cinema Suite, Simple Waypoint, Curvey, etc.. (Im not familiar with Cinema Machine) all you have to do is tell those systems to move the Helios camera rig.

3) Aspect Ratios and Frame Rates:
Yeah, you are right. This needs to be fully implemented.
When I initially made Helios, it was working for power of 2 aspect ratios, but I can get that updated in the next release I do, which wont be too long from now. (There is an update I submitted yesterday which includes animated GIF output).
I will make sure to convert to true cinematic aspect in the output images, and add the 25 FPS option for you.

4) Other assets that record video:
My initial goal was to only do 360 recording, but along the way I decided I wanted to make the best in class video recording solution for Unity. One thing that I can promise you is that I directly listen to my users and work very close with them to understand their needs and keep them productive. I have a Skype support group with a lot of members on it.
I frequently post beta builds there as well as offer realtime chat and screenshare based support. Even if you hated Helios, you would likely love my support

Here is a link to the Skype group if you would like to join :
https://join.skype.com/Cb69olXJbDTo

All the best!
John

 

Hi John,

Many thanks for the replies! Yep - I have spent the afternoon reading the docs, watching the vid a couple of times, and generally working with Helios. It makes a lot of sense and actually is very intuitive. I am heartily pleased you chose to go beyond the 3D VR movie asset - honestly, I think a tool like this is standard kit. Many folks from small indie vfx and design houses are getting into Unity, adding it to their arsenal, learning it to varying degrees, and all these folk, including me, are looking for solutions to get high quality video out of their Unity work. It does produce some very high quality output - my initial attempts with it are producing some very nice material, and I am very pleased.

The camera movement stuff as well, once I had RTFM, made complete sense. That'll learn me not to dive in and overthink.

Thanks very much for looking at adding those formats and frame rates - much appreciated.

I'll also be joining your Skype group. Hating Helios doesn't look like something I'll be doing!

So, all very cool and good then - looking forward to future updates - a solid piece of kit.

 

Good deal,
I'm glad that you figured it out, like I said before, Helios does a LOT, and it was a challenge to get it all into a single UI that made sense.

It's funny you mention Film and VFX, as that was part of the main reason to make Helios. David Helgeson had said not too long ago that he was looking to get Unity into the hands of film and VFX studios and it would be a upcoming push for Unity, so it made sense to have tools like this ready. That being said, I would love to pick your brain some and get some feedback on what Helios can do better in your shop.

Just let me know when you join the Skype Group.
Oh, also, send me a PM with your order number and your Google managed email address and I will give you access to the beta folder where I put beta builds.

John

 

I want to use Helios to do high quality (normal/non-360) video capture of my Unity game. Think high quality footage for trailer. Is that possible? Does it work out of the box? If so, awesome!

-Jeff

 

Well, just found this in the 1st paragraph of docs: "...as well as High Definition 2D video..."

So I guess that answers my question.

 

Hi Jeff,

Yea, it does, but I guess you found that out

 

Change to Helios:
Hi everyone, just an update/FYI about a change to Helios.
It was brought to my attention by the Asset Store that I was not allowed to distribute FFMPEG inside the Helios package.
So as of version 1.0.4 and higher, FFMPEG will not be installed by default any longer....However, there is a link on the Helios Menu to directly download the package from my Google drive. It's a silly licensing issue, but an important one.

So, TLDR,
You will need to download an additional UnityPackage from my website to fully use Helios from now on.

Thanks for understanding.

John

 

I recall seeing someone asking about 8K and 16K output, and aside from the usage of those formats in VR, I got to thinking about trying to squeeze as much quality out of Unity as possible, given the AA and various shadow qualities. Trying the alpha SMAA on 5.4, it's actually pretty nice. Looking at some offerings on the Asset Store, the top priced but highly rated one is around $64 and pricey, as far as assets go.

But applying the SMAA to a UHD (4K) 2D planar render, then downsizing to 1080p, a 50% image size reduction, significantly adds to the quality - very old school AA: render big and downsize. So actually 8K and 16K would have massive potential in getting that extra layer of quality out of Unity for those folks who are using it to generate high quality video as part of their work.

 

Following on from that, I know that stereo is not on the cards yet, but I just saw a comment from a dev working in 3D about 360 VR, that if it's not in stereo, it's not VR. In fairness, that is true. If the camera is moving through a scene, then parallax is critical to the illusion, and hence the stereo. There is nothing necessarily wrong with moving through a scene (or even live action) and allowing the user to look around, but the lack of stereo means the effect is strictly not VR. Without stereo, what we have (in any 360 VR solution without stereo) is a hybrid between a pano shot static from the nodal point (no parallax) and full 360 stereo VR.

In addition, 4K is regarded as an absolute minimum for this - 8K is better, and 16K is on the horizon; in fact it's available now to those who can justify the need and the cost.

I think ultimately Helios will need to have all of this going on, but obviously I would regard those as major paid feature upgrades, rightly so.

EDIT: I should clarify that because the camera is moving through the scene, of course there is parallax - bit vague how I described it - but stereo would tip that effect into a much fuller illusion of parallax.

 

Well, Quality is one part of the equation, but you have to remember that when (in 360 mode) you may record at 4K, but you will only every see 1/6th of that image at once. I can take Super Sampling AA approach in Helios, and output the Base render textures at 8,16,32,64K etc... and then downsample them as you mention.

I think the problem is the disconnect between what :
a) people think they want
b) what is practical
c) what their computers can actually handle.

At every squared power you go up, processing takes 4x as long. So, people who dont have SSD, 1070+ video cards and at least a terabyte of temp storage, its just a technology thats out of reach for them.

That being said, I can add it